SpaceX, Bigelow announce private space station alliance

SpaceX will carry passengers to Bigelow's inflatable habitats

SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace have announced a new marketing alliance for SpaceX transportation to Bigelow private space stations. SpaceX will take customers, both private and governmental, to orbit using its Dragon reusable space capsule; Bigelow will host them using its BA330 inflatable space habitats, which will presumably be launched on a larger rocket. No announcement was made concerning who would carry the stations themselves to orbit.

For several years now, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Robert Bigelow, a construction entrepreneur who owns Budget Suites of America, have discussed forming a partnership to transport Bigelow customers. Bigelow originally licensed the TransHab technology from NASA after it was dropped from Space Station plans due to funding shortages, and founded his eponymous company to develop the inflatable habitats. It made rapid progress, and in 2006 and 2007, launched Genesis proof-of-concept modules on Russian Dnepr rockets (which are converted surplus ICBMs). The two 11.5 cubic meter modules were a success, and large for their cost. Inflatable habitats are much lighter and can be every bit as well-shielded as their smaller aluminum predecessors.

Since that time, Bigelow Aerospace has developed commercial space station designs while waiting for launch technology to catch up. They built a 181,000 sq. ft. manufacturing plant in North Las Vegas, Nevada, and they also built Boeing's CST-100 test capsule under NASA's Commercial Crew program.

Bigelow has reserved a Falcon 9 for launch in 2014, but no one is quite sure what it will be for. It now looks as if it might launch a Dragon spacecraft, but that's still speculation.

Regardless of how the big modules make it into space (BA-330 is 20,000 kg and 330 cubic meters), Falcon 9 and Dragon should be low-cost passenger carriers. Bigelow and SpaceX state in the press release that they plan to market the new services in Japan first, right after the SpaceX attempt to berth Dragon at the International Space Station on May 19. Until that time, everyone at SpaceX is probably too occupied getting ready for the launch to pay attention to anything else.

From Japan, the two companies may move on to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, where Bigelow signed a memorandum of understanding in 2011 to work on microgravity research and development. Bigelow's large, private spacecraft give many countries the ability to do space station research at a small fraction of the cost that was required to build the International Space Station. Bigelow has spoken of leasing them as well, dropping the price for space station access even further.

When asked whether SpaceX had announced the agreement with Bigelow Aerospace in response to yesterday's news from ATK, SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham replied that the deal had been planned for some time and was unrelated to other news. Some industry speculation is that the alliance will help speed the process of getting Dragon approved for human use. It gives SpaceX a new private market for a human-rated spacecraft and may allow the company to bring a manned Dragon online sooner.

ATK may have applied some pressure there, as it stated on Wednesday that it would be able to begin carrying astronauts to the Space Station in 2015, two years sooner than has been predicted for their competition, including SpaceX. ATK has capitalized on government-developed and government-sponsored pieces for its new entry into the commercial market.

ATK should rename Liberty to Frankenstein or Lego. Unlike Spacex, you have a large collection of mostly unproven parts that have never been combined together, and thanks to the Constellation program were mostly paid for with billions of tax dollars. Rockets aren't Legos and SRB's have no business as a first stage for human cargo. One day perhaps ATK will learn, but they pay alot of money to lobbyists to keep them in the game.

SpaceX and Bigelow would be a very good partnership, as they are serious about lowering costs, and depending on the success of the cargo launch test coming up, they are a hell of alot closer to having a flying spacecraft then ATK is at turning a tech demo into a spacecraft.

As for launching the BA330, SpaceX is working on Falcon Heavy and it would easily loft it if successful.

The two companies (SpaceX and Bigelow) seemed to be a natural fit from early on. I'm actually a bit surprised an official announcement came only now.

I'm guessing it's so that the announcement has some credibility and to take advantage of the buzz around the first private resupply mission to the ISS. There's a big difference between even the first Dragon test flight and getting everything in place to send it to ISS. The first was well - a test (very impressive) flight, whereas the second is an honest to goodness serious mission to an actual space station, which implicitly has a seal of approval (or at least acceptance) from some pretty conservative types at the major national space agencies.

Assuming the flight goes to plan, that's not a bad place to be for drumming up investor interest. I think an earlier announcement would have been too easy to dismiss as overenthusiasm after a first test.

That should read "SpaceX announces deal to shuttle very rich tourists to private space stations"

Its going to be a longgggg time before such "travel" is within reach of the majority of people and maybe my grandkids grand kids will see it.

Just wait until the asteroid mining industry is bigger; we'll need all sorts of support people up there for that. Robot maintenance, mining equipment maintenance, station maintenance, construction, fabrication - heck, if it's profitable enough, we might even have whole villages up there! I'd work a 5-year stint for free if it was 5 years in space :-)

I'm not particularly surprised: If SpaceX really wants to make it big in space, let alone go to Mars, they need other partners. Bigalow is the obvious choice for habitation modules because transhab is such a great tech.

I'd be ecstatic if they threw Ad Astra into the mix. That'd be a big signal that they have plans outside of LEO.

Congress, never missing a chance to miss the point, wants to force NASA into selecting a single commercial crew transport provider, negating any benefit of competition.

Bigelow, as a private venture, has always insisted that their business model requires at least two transport providers for redundancy and price control. They are already engaged in a contract relationship with Boeing for the CST-100 transport, which many consider to be the favorite in Congress.

So if Congress is going to force NASA into a monogamous relationship with Boeing, then Bigelow needs to take matters into their own hands to ensure that they have a second provider, and SpaceX needs to hedge their big bet on the NASA crew transport competition, because Congress hates them.

In other news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the first public photo of the Grasshopper vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL) vehicle under construction in Texas:

The thrust structure and landing undercarriage looks nearly complete. Next comes the Falcon 9 first stage propellant tank and a single brand-new Merlin 1D rocket engine, which will generate 140,000 pounds of thrust at sea level using a turbopump designed and manufactured in-house by SpaceX. Then they can start doing some hops, which they expect to commence by the end of this year.

@Grimble, this is a long time in the making. I can't wait for what alpha_dk said though, by that time I will be extremely qualified to do a job like that. We're FINALLY at the point of going into space, and hopefully never leaving.

Anybody else just amazed that we're talking about something like this?

Amazed and more than a little excited. I have my doubts about space becoming an affordable tourist destination in my lifetime, but the fact that we're on the cusp of (possibly) competitive privately operated space transportation just sends shivers down my spine. Jack_o wrote with despair that maybe his grandkids' grandkids will see it as just a normal part of the world, but with the sudden acceleration of progress in the last couple of years I think I may be able to (jealously) watch my grandchildren move "up there" for their jobs.

That should read "SpaceX announces deal to shuttle very rich tourists to private space stations"

Its going to be a longgggg time before such "travel" is within reach of the majority of people and maybe my grandkids grand kids will see it.

Good point. Somebody changed the headline to be less accurate. Bigelow plans to lease to government customers in addition to private ones.

The average world income last year was $7000, so certainly what you say is true. The majority of people will not be able to afford space travel in the near future. The cost of LOX and fuel, however, is not so high that $7000 might not buy you a ride to orbit on a reusable rocket some day. The expense is almost entirely in what gets thrown away.

Congress, never missing a chance to miss the point, wants to force NASA into selecting a single commercial crew transport provider, negating any benefit of competition.

Bigelow, as a private venture, has always insisted that their business model requires at least two transport providers for redundancy and price control. They are already engaged in a contract relationship with Boeing for the CST-100 transport, which many consider to be the favorite in Congress.

So if Congress is going to force NASA into a monogamous relationship with Boeing, then Bigelow needs to take matters into their own hands to ensure that they have a second provider, and SpaceX needs to hedge their big bet on the NASA crew transport competition, because Congress hates them.

In other news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the first public photo of the Grasshopper vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL) vehicle under construction in Texas:

The thrust structure and landing undercarriage looks nearly complete. Next comes the Falcon 9 first stage propellant tank and a single brand-new Merlin 1D rocket engine, which will generate 140,000 pounds of thrust at sea level using a turbopump designed and manufactured in-house by SpaceX. Then they can start doing some hops, which they expect to commence by the end of this year.

Cool link, Butters! Thanks!

One of the things that's really been ticking me off the last few days is my near-certainty that during the last three years the Texas, Utah, Alabama and Florida congressional delegations have almost certainly known all the details of Liberty. Pondering the last few years in Congress with that fact in mind fills in a lot of blanks, and implies to me that they have deliberately been slowing the other competitors down so that ATK could complete their (government-sponsored) testing and announce that Liberty was two years ahead of the other guys. That makes ATK the new and old congressional favorite. Surprise. We've been had, once again.

I have my doubts about space becoming an affordable tourist destination in my lifetime, but the fact that we're on the cusp of (possibly) competitive privately operated space transportation just sends shivers down my spine.

I don't care so much about visiting space as I do about potentially getting to Sydney or Hong Kong in two hours or less.

ATK should rename Liberty to Frankenstein or Lego. Unlike Spacex, you have a large collection of mostly unproven parts that have never been combined together, and thanks to the Constellation program were mostly paid for with billions of tax dollars. Rockets aren't Legos and SRB's have no business as a first stage for human cargo.

If it is cheap, it will be used. However, I'm not keen on SRBs, which are _very_ dirty Cold War technology. Not that launchers gets up as often as aircraft of course.

normally butters wrote:

Congress, never missing a chance to miss the point, wants to force NASA into selecting a single commercial crew transport provider, negating any benefit of competition.

Was it US' congress that choose to go for the more complicated automatic cargo transport as first commercials too? Seeing the complexity and delays with ATV/HTV/Dragon, a manned LEO transport would have been up much earlier (with or without the LAS that the Shuttle lacked). AFAIK the HTV was 6 years late because of that single item!

And someone choose to go for the new large cargo docking ports, meaning that the simpler automated docking that the Soyuz does was off the table as well. No, they had to go for the berthing mixed mode and position hold complexities...

Kind of an odd announcement given that Bigelow laid off most of their technical and development staff last year. I've read comments suggesting that since the layoffs, the company has effectively been in life support mode.

Even if this announcement is simply a case of SpaceX packaging Bigelow's inflatables with SpaceX's launch service, what happens when (not if) technical problems crop up with the modules? It's kind of hard to fix problems with most of the development staff gone.

If SpaceX were buying out Bigelow, that would make sense. This, as it stands, doesn't.

Even if this announcement is simply a case of SpaceX packaging Bigelow's inflatables with SpaceX's launch service, what happens when (not if) technical problems crop up with the modules? It's kind of hard to fix problems with most of the development staff gone.

Surely there would be enough information for SpaceX staff to work on if such issues do arise? I find it rather strange that they would sign such a deal, launch it and then have no way to resolve any problems, especially considering SpaceX's expertise.

And that involved a whole lot of learning completely new things. In contrast we've had solid technology for space for the last 30 years, it is not new ground. What we've been lacking is significant amounts of money being used effectively...a business strategy with money behind it. All this has been waiting on is someone with enough capital to use it appropriately, rather than the only significant source of $$$ being congress attempting to use NASA as a pork funnel. What has changed? The opening of space no longer moves solely at the glacial pace of government bureaucracy and the whims of congressional funding. On the list of recent major investors in space we have:

...and those are just the headliner heavy hitters, there are a lot of others who aren't as massively wealthy but who are also bringing significant amounts of $$$ to the table. The Stratolauncher and Planetary Resources things were stealth projects in progress for a while that only recently became public. I have little doubt that there are more that are stealthed right now, and others starting to come together as a result of high net worth individuals seeing other high profile high net worth people jumping into the pool first.

Every sign is indicating that space development which has been simmering for the last 40 years is about to come to a rapid boil in the next 5 years. The pace of change is going to be stunning to people who have watched it crawl since Apollo because what is driving it is fundamentally different from how it worked when it was driven almost entirely by the government.

So while I don't think it is going to be cut rate in my lifetime, I strongly suspect that it'll be available to the same sorts of people who flew on the Concorde in my kids lifetimes. I think you will be shocked by how much has changed by the end of the decade. The 2016-2017 timeframe in particular is shaping up to be a time of pretty huge change as a lot of stuff in development now will be actually online then. Right now the headlines are about what people plan to do and it already generates some excitement, imagine how much momentum things will gain when the headlines are about what is actually happening.

The floodgates have certainly opened for these space announcements of late. It makes me very optimistic for the future. Not that I'll ever be able to afford a ticket to space in my lifetime, but I can dream...